Dr. Lola Adeyemo joins the pod to help you, as a mid-level leader, re‑engage employees whose life experience beyond the workplace is radically different from your own.

A tough fact of organizational leadership. You’re a caring mid-level leader, but your immigrant employees might still feel uneasy about you.

If that suggestion pokes you a little bit, I invite you to be curious about the irritation for a moment. Ask your soul what might be going on.

And then hit play on this roundtable conversation with Dr. Lola Adeyemo and Ken the Boomer, Craig the Xer, Emily the Xennial, LaShone the Millennial and Madeleine the Gen Z.

Karen Sergeant joins the pod to discuss misplaced fears about AI. These new tools can be scary, sure. But they can also make leadership miscommunication utterly visible and surprisingly reparable.

A tree falls at work…does it make a sound?

The question is partially inspired by a personal story. My family’s front yard Norway Maple fell in a winter storm just before New Year’s. Thankfully, nobody was in the yard when it fell, but we definitely heard the whoooooooouuuumph the tree made as it hit the ground.As we chainsawed it into firewood, piled up the brambles, and ground the stump, I kept wondering:

Was there anything we could have done to keep this tree from falling?

This sad tree story is also a parable for struggling workplace leadership.

The winds at work today are gale-force. We’re enduring political storms (who can stop thinking about Alex Pretti and Renee Good?). We’re blown about by digital overwhelm: so many shiny new tools, so few trust-building encounters. And to make things gustier, there’s Hurricane AI.

These storms are real. But today’s Mode/Switch guest, Karen Sergeant, redirects focus from external forces to root problems. Last summer, I started reading her Substack Human in the Loop to benefit from her indispensably fresh takes on AI and work culture. Now, I’m so pleased to have her join the Mode/Switch to show how the windstorm of generative AI could transform the workplace for the better if it’s a “forcing function for better leadership.”

But (you ask), how could all those sycophantic chatbots force leaders to recognize patterns of mis-communication? Our 30-minutes podcast will show you how. So, pull up to the roundtable!

I confess my opening question above was a little misleading. I’m not suggesting that you’re about to fall like that tree in my front yard. I’m more worried that, if you don’t communicate clearly, your team will.But improve your internal comms, and you’ll improve the whole ecology.

How do you equip workplace "follower-ship" without turning it into an excuse for toxic leadership?

That question gets teased our in this episode's intergenerational conversation on the Mode/Switch with Rabbi Elan Babchuck. He helps you see that, if you’re frustrated with your workplace leaders, you may need to strengthen your follower-ship by

• sharing brave feedback from other employees on the floor, and

• concocting new ideas for needed change (in a process Elan calls Plus-Delta)

• communicating the org vision in a way that other followers can hear and share

Being a good follower’s a discerning art. And a risky one. Your leader may be plunging forward toward places you don’t think the org should go! But in any case, there’s a close, close relation between a leader’s ability to forge footsteps and a follower’s ability to speak up and name reality.

Riley Johnston, our Mode/Switch audio and video editor, helps make this podcast a tight half-hour convo. But this week, she had her work cut out for her, because our recording session with Elan was nearly an hour long. Here’s a story he told that, unfortunately, fell to the editing floor.

The morning of our recording session, Elan had been trying to get his three kids out the door for school. His plan for an on-time arrival was working until his daughter sat down on the floor and announced she was going to tie her own shoes. Elan’s fingers were twitching to do it for her. All he could think was, Must. Get. Child. To. School.

But instead of snatching the laces from his daughter, Elan pulled himself up short and asked which was better: being on-time to school or empowering his daughter. He went with option B.

That’s just one of the stories he tells to show how good leadership (what he was trying to do as a dad) and active follower-ship (what his self-directed daughter sought to be) are integrally bound up in each other.

And as a social entrepreneur, innovator, nonprofit leader, and CEO (not to mention a rabbi), Elan’s done a lot of leading, as you can see here. He’s also been widely published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Religion News Service. He’s spoken here at Calvin at the Festival of Faith & Writing about insights from his co-authored book Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire (2023, Fortress Press).

This week’s team includes Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and LaShone the millennial. We were delighted to speak with Elan, who’s our first return guest. Check out his earlier appearance ⁠here⁠.

The Mode/Switch Team’s on vacation till mid-January. If you celebrate this holiday, we wish you a Merry Christmas. And given that this week’s guest was a rabbi, I’d be especially remiss if I failed to say Happy Hanukkah!